I just copied my whole root partition to a new Laptop over netcat. It still has close hardware (Intel CPU, no extra GPU, etc.), but some differences in interfaces etc.
Things one might have to consider:
/etc/fstab will need to be redone
All interfaces changed, so network configs may need to be updated
Other programs relying on hardware or paths that don’t exist anymore need to be updated (eg. conky did not work due to i8k being not supported, other interface ids etc.)
But literally nothing that would break anything. Because Arch is usually installed manually, one knows what needs to be cared for, what could break or could cause certain issues.
To be fair, Signal, Threema and Discord use Electron, and therefore are just crappy bullshit on Wayland.
Using a dedicated FF instance uses less RAM, CPU and disk space, and gives you more control over the application/website.
Discord has a web version, even if it doesn’t support some features, so I use it in FF. WhatsApp has a web version, so I use it in FF.
Signal does not. So it’s barely usable on my Nvidia desktop.
We do not need ““native”” Applications, made with a mix of a web version and a D tier browser engine, if we could just use the already installed, better and perfectly working browser.
Discords Electron was outdated and vulnerable for years, FF would be patched in days or hours in case of a zero day.
Electron uses much more resources than FF. Because every company thinks they need a custom version of electron, every app brings its own bloaty electron environment, despite there being a system one.
Electron/Chromium is extremely buggy on Wayland + Nvidia, to the point I cannot use Spotify, Discord or Steam correctly.
I just noticed I did not fully expand the fs on the target machine after shrinking it on the source machine to be sure it fits. No problem, growing ext4 file systems with resize2fs (indirect dependency of linux and base) works on mounted fs’ too, the Kernel just needs to be newer than 2.6 (so since 2003).
Took less than 1 second and works flawlessly, live. Conkys fs_free just jumped from 20 to 76. Still time to clear my caches.
I’d guess many distros would’ve had errors with preinstalled and configured helpers. Debugging them would be a pain
Gentoo, LFS, Arch etc. are installed manually, so one typically knows their system very well, including packages and configs they might have to hard configure interfaces etc. in
The rate was around 100MB/s. So I think the bottleneck was probably the read/write speeds of the SSDs, considering I have ~900Mbit/s down from speedtest.net, and this setup removed every hop except the old and new Laptops Gigabit Lan Port and the Gigabit patch cable between them. But with larger files/partitions over the internet this would probably help